TWENTY-ONE
Darcy stared into the half-fogged mirror, admiring the round swell of her belly as she turned from one side to the other. The swirling wisps of warm steam pinwheeled through the air as the bathroom door opened and then Jeff’s reflection joined her an instant before his hands became solid, gathering the wet tendrils of her hair so it twisted to hang down her chest.
“Talk about an incentive to come home early,” he murmured in her ear, their eyes locked in the reflection before them. Her, a naked bounty of soft and round and ripe, and him, a devastating contrast of disheveled and immaculate as always.
“Only in your world is seven early, Jeff.”
His hands smoothed down the length of her back, his thumbs working gentle circles into the muscles strained from carrying the weight of two bodies in one. And then they slid forward over the hard swell of her belly, coasting in that reverent caress of here and there before succumbing to the temptation he could never resist. He cupped her breasts, gently taking their weight in his palms.
“Used to be your world, too.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t at the office at six-thirty in the morning, either.”
Those wicked thumbs made their first pass across her nipples and her breath rushed out in a shuddery gasp as she grabbed for the marble vanity in front of her.
She wanted to wrap her arms around his neck and bury her face in the front of his shirt. Breathe in the masculine scent of him, but that would mean she couldn’t watch.
Satisfaction gleamed in the eyes still holding hers as Jeff now brought his mouth to the curve of her neck, wetting that decadent spot with the slide of his tongue that had her body reacting in ways she couldn’t control.
Her hips pushing back into the strong thighs braced behind her. Her lips parting on a ragged breath.
“God, I love coming home to this.”
To this.
Not to her.
He loved this heightened, ever ready state of semi-arousal that had been the hormonal flip side to all those months of nausea. It wasn’t news. And it wasn’t a blow.
It was a reality she’d accepted and made peace with a month ago. Embraced. Because with his mouth moving against her skin, his thumbs making one slow circling pass over her nipples after another—she was so sensitive—his erection thickening long and hard against her bottom, she loved it, too.
She loved the release. Loved how sexy he made her feel. Loved the hot look he was giving her now.
And more than that, she loved the way this man never stopped surprising her. She loved the spontaneous unstoppable side of him that, last week, had him pulling her out of her seat at the tapas bar they frequented and spiriting her off for a night flight over L.A. in his helicopter. She loved that low growl rumbling against her neck every time he put his arms around her and the way, just before he fell asleep, he always pulled her that much closer.
She loved that he held her hand when they walked along the beach and, no matter where they found themselves, a gallery, the symphony or local market, the insatiable man always had something decadent and outrageously wicked to whisper in her ear.
And she loved that he knew it drove her wild.
It was so good. Like nothing she’d dreamed could be possible.
Not enough.
The words whispered through her mind, unwelcome, but not entirely unfamiliar.
Only she wasn’t supposed to want more. She knew better.
But how was she going to give this up? How was she going to give him up when she’d already fallen—
“What’s the matter?” Jeff asked, a furrow between his brows, his hands on her breasts still.
She shook her head. “Don’t stop.”
He stared at her through another beat, those too-perceptive eyes searching until she bit into her bottom lip, drawing his focus back to the need between them both. Then, “Please.”
Their time was limited. She didn’t want to waste a second.
* * *
The balmy night air surrounded them as Jeff watched Darcy suck and lick her last spoonful of brownie batter ice cream, if not totally immune to what she was doing to that spoon, at least in a place where he could control his physical reaction to the pleasured moans accompanying it. Though possibly his newfound control had more to do with knowing an hour before, he’d been the reason for Darcy’s moans, and they’d put this paltry ice cream business to shame.
Still. He leaned close to Darcy’s ear as they walked. “You know my ego’s working itself into a snit right now.”
Darcy slanted him a questioning look, her lips still wrapped around the spoon.
“With all that moaning, he’s going to have something to prove in a serious way when we get home.”
Her brows pulled together in some sort of faux apologetic look totally belied by the deliberate way she then slid the spoon in and out between her lips, adding a sultry little moan wholly different from the unconscious ones she’d been delivering moments before and Jeff’s head shot around looking to see if anyone on the street was watching. But thankfully no one seemed aware, and then Darcy was just laughing, filling the street around them with that easy gorgeous sound he couldn’t get enough of as she tossed her empty dish into a trash.
She was so relaxed now. Untroubled. Different from when they’d been making love and suddenly she wasn’t in the same sensual place they’d been sharing the moment before. He’d let her put him off, but now he wanted to understand.
“Earlier tonight, Darcy, where did you go?”
She knew what he was talking about. He could see it in the instant of deliberation flashing through her eyes before she made the decision to trust him with the truth.
“I never realized what I was missing before,” she answered, staring down the street ahead of them. “I mean I saw couples together, saw them having fun, but I always wondered what happened when they went home and no one was around to see, whether those bright smiles turned to fear.”
Jeff’s stomach turned to lead, and he pulled Darcy to a stop. “Did someone make you afraid?”
She seemed to consider, almost as if she didn’t know the answer. In the end, though, she found her way to it. “Not a boyfriend of my own. I didn’t really let guys get that close. But yes. My mom wasn’t so discriminating and some of the guys who took us in—they made me scared.”
He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do anything but take her hand because he needed to hold it, and wait for her to tell him the rest.
“Some of them had tempers that could get physical. And some of them would look at me in ways they shouldn’t. And some of them just liked to play the kind of control games that might mean going hungry or not being able to go to school or to sleep.”
“How the hell could she have let you live like that?” he asked, sickened and enraged by the actions of a woman he knew to have died in a car accident years before.
Darcy wouldn’t meet his eyes. And when she answered, the hollow sound of her voice was like a blade to his heart.
“She said she didn’t have a choice and we’d starve without someone to take care of us. She told me she couldn’t risk leaving me alone with them to get a job, that we couldn’t leave until she found someone else. Someone better. But that was a joke. The guys she found...” She shook her head. “I don’t know what was wrong with her. But the guys she gravitated to were all just different shades of the same sick. And the worst of it was, I actually believed she didn’t have a choice. I thought she was trapped the same way I was. I didn’t know there were programs to help us. I didn’t know she was actually choosing to live that way, to make me live that way until I got the full-time job that let me pay rent. Now that I’m going to be a mother and the need to protect this baby is so strong within me, it’s like a tangible thing—more than ever I want to know why. But it’s too late to ask, and I don’t think I could have believed anything she said anyway.”
Jeff pulled her into his arms, stroking her hair as a part of him died inside thinking of those beautiful gray eyes he’d seen so many ways filled with fear, their innocence draining away years too soon.
“Baby, I’m so sorry.”
Now he got it. This was why she’d dropped out of school.
Why she’d been afraid to trust him enough to let him take care of her.
Why with all the money and resources at his disposal, he’d never be able to give her the thing she wanted most in her life. To be totally independent. And worse, that hard-won freedom she’d sacrificed so much for? He was the reason she’d lost it. He’d taken it away.
And when he looked at the round swell of her belly, he couldn’t even regret it.
All he could do was show her there was another way. Prove that he never wanted to hold her back or hem her in or take away the opportunities available to her. He’d make certain she never felt trapped because of him again. She’d never need to escape.
Cradling her jaw in his hands he met her eyes.
“I know you don’t believe in the fairy-tale rescues and you’ve already saved yourself, Darcy, but I’m behind you now, too. Nothing will ever be like that again. Not for you. Not for our baby. I swear it.”
Blinking back tears, Darcy nodded and said the most amazing thing. “I already know.”
* * *
“Locker-room talk?” Connor scoffed, his voice oozing the kind of censure only a best friend could muster. “I thought you were above all that.”
Jeff paused in the act of relocating the stacks of papers and files from his desk to a mirror position on the conference table at the other end of the office.
“It’s not like I’m starting a daily blog.” He looked at the half-cleared desk, and then at the clock, his heart kicking up. “But holy hell, man—”
“Yeah, I’ve got it. The hormones. They’re like the sea. And the tide’s turned or whatever.”
“She was at the door. Waiting, Connor. At the door. I didn’t make it past the coat stand. For. An. Hour.”
Connor made an indifferent noise that had Jeff shaking his head in stunned disbelief.
“Good to hear she’s feeling better. So what’s Gail think about the move?”
“Yeah, yeah, Darcy’s feeling much better. Aside from the mornings, she hasn’t been sick for about two weeks. And my mom—she’s not pressing. I told her I was more comfortable with Darcy staying with me. Didn’t want to miss out on anything, yada, yada, yada. But forget about my mom and pay attention. About the hormones, because seriously, you and Megan might want to—”
“Enough. I get it. The sex with your pregnant non-girlfriend lover—”
“Darcy.”
“Okay, sex with Darcy is insane. But I’m starting to feel a shade dirty, hearing about it.”
Jeff stalled where he was. Yeah, truth was, he didn’t want Connor thinking about Darcy like that, either. He wasn’t nuts about the few details he’d been subjected to about Megan. There was just something different about being subjected to details about a guy’s wife.
Not that Darcy was his wife.
The intercom from his desk sounded. “Ms. Penn here to see you.”
With a quick goodbye for Connor, Jeff started to return the phone to his pants pocket, then thinking better of it, tossed it onto a chair. In one sweep, he had the rest of his desk cleared and the stack dumped in a heap on the conference table. And then he was striding to the door, swinging it open with a welcome greeting that didn’t make it past his lips once he saw Darcy waiting for him in a shirt he knew for a fact she’d decided was too tight the week before. His eyes went momentarily unfocused as his tongue all but rolled out of his mouth.
“Hi, Jeff,” she said. And he was sure it sounded completely innocuous to anyone who hadn’t heard all the incredibly, fantastically naughty things coming out of her mouth when she’d called him thirty minutes before.
“Darcy, glad you could come. By. To talk.” He coughed into his hand, mentally giving himself a violent shake. “Come on in.”
Her gauzy layered skirt swung around her calves, showing off the slender turn of her ankles and hinting at the sexy length of what hid beneath.
Pulling his door closed behind them, he ducked back out offering a quick, “Hold my calls.”
And then Darcy had hold of his tie and was pulling him deeper into his office. Tugging at him with hands that were everywhere at once.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she gasped, when he jerked his tie loose and was halfway down the buttons of his shirt. “Faster.”
“Wrong with you? Not one damn thing,” he assured, wishing he had four hands instead of two so he could get them both naked in the next six point two seconds. Because now that she was here, he needed to make good on the promise she’d breathlessly reminded him of from the backseat of her car.
“You said you’d take care of me.”
Apparently she’d been at the organic market shopping for dinner when she’d started feeling restless as she’d explained it. And then she’d started thinking about his desk. The high shine airplane wing that was the prize in his collection. With him on it.
Jeff freed the last button and started in on his fly, at which point he realized Darcy’s eyes had glazed with lust and she’d only gotten her blouse half open before abandoning the task, in lieu of watching him strip.
Which reminded him of the night at his mother’s house...
Slowing it down, Jeff methodically unbuckled his belt and then pulled it free of the loops.
“What—what are you doing?” Darcy asked, the breathless tremble in her words sending blood pounding toward his groin.
“Making you wait.” He rolled the belt and set it on the desk chair. And shrugged one shoulder out of his shirt and then the other. “Letting you watch.”
Darcy blinked in rapid repetition, her throat making some effort at words that didn’t get past a few clicks.
Crossing his arms to reach for opposite sides of his T-shirt, he eased it up, getting hotter and harder with every grueling second that passed of watching Darcy watch him. Yeah, slow was definitely better than fast. This time.
He pulled the T-shirt overhead and Darcy let out a little sigh, spurring him on. His hands went to his pants, to the top button, the tab of his zipper, then lower as it traveled down, the teeth straining against his hard-on. He leaned back against his desk, shirtless, his pants open, his erection beyond the point of containment as it pushed past the top of his boxer briefs.
“Your body,” she murmured, those smoky, soft gray eyes flitting to his for a moment of contact. “Is my very favorite plaything.”
Shoving the briefs beneath his sac, he took himself in hand. “And you said we had nothing in common.”
Darcy sucked a harsh breath, as he firmed his grip and rode up and down the length of his shaft with a few slow, sure strokes.
“Oh, God,” she whimpered, wetting her lips with the sexy pink tip of her tongue. “I—I— You— I’m so—”
“Yeah,” he groaned, “me, too. Take off your blouse for me, gorgeous.”
Without taking her eyes off the up and down cycle of his hand, she undid her shirt, slipping out of it and letting it flutter to the ground, as her hands found the soft, ripe mounds of breasts that seemed to be growing in proportion to her belly.
“Like this?” she asked, the flush of excitement pinkening her skin as she ran her shaking open palms against the stiff points of her nipples.
“Yes.” Immediately he eased up on his grip, because, holy hell, add Darcy touching herself while she watched him? A man knew his limits. “Your skirt, too.”
Catching her bottom lip in the clasp of her teeth she gingerly stepped over to his desk chair and sat down. He stalled, wondering what—but then she was inching the filmy layers of her skirt up one teasing inch at a time, until he could see what she was most deliberately showing him.
And the world ceased to spin.
“Panties?” he choked out.
“Didn’t think I was going to need them,” she said with that mind-blowing mix of shy minx as she reached between her legs.
He couldn’t be seeing what he thought he was seeing. Even if he’d started this game and she seemed to like it a lot, she’d been shy about it. So this couldn’t—
“Letting you watch,” she moaned, reading the question in his eyes. “Making you wait.”
One slender brow arched his way and suddenly, his gorgeous girl was in the power position. And he was all for letting her have it. For the next few minutes anyway.
“Don’t stop, Jeff.”
He resumed his stroke, fighting for control as he watched Darcy’s fingers play at the place he desperately wanted to visit. She was slick and swollen, panting and ready, and getting close to the peak he wanted to take her to himself.
Needed to take her to himself.
This game had gone on long enough.
Going to his knees, he caught Darcy by the backs of hers and wheeled the chair closer.
A moment more and their discarded shirts were tucked behind her back, her hips were at the edge of the chair and her legs trembled atop his shoulders as he licked and kissed and teased her.
And then slowly, so slowly, so she wouldn’t miss a second of what was happening, and he wouldn’t miss a second of her response, he made a firm point of his tongue and sank into her waiting center.
“Jeff!”
His name hit with the first clench of her sex because all it had taken was one slow thrust and she’d come apart around his tongue. And because he wasn’t ready to give up even one second he could have of this, he continued to lap and kiss and stroke her until he’d coaxed the very last shudder from her body.
Rocking back on his heels, he looked into her gorgeous, pleasure-sated face. He’d never get tired of seeing her look at him that way.
Her smoky eyes tracked over him. “I knew I could count on you.”
He let out a gruff laugh. “I aim to please.”
“Good,” she hummed, easing out of the office chair with Jeff’s help. When she was up, she flashed him another sultry smile. “Up on the desk. You promised.”
Hell, yes.